How WikiTok Was Created

Benj Edwards, writing at Ars Technica:

The original idea for WikiTok originated from developer Tyler Angert on Monday evening when he tweeted, “insane project idea: all of wikipedia on a single, scrollable page.” Bloomberg Beta VC James Cham replied, “Even better, an infinitely scrolling Wikipedia page based on whatever you are interested in next?” and Angert coined “WikiTok” in a follow-up post.

Early the next morning, at 12:28 am, writer Grant Slatton quote-tweeted the WikiTok discussion, and that’s where Gemal came in. “I saw it from [Slatton’s] quote retweet,” he told Ars. “I immediately thought, ‘Wow I can build an MVP [minimum viable product] and this could take off.’”

Gemal started his project at 12:30 am, and with help from AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor, he finished a prototype by 2 am and posted the results on X. Someone later announced WikiTok on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where it topped the site’s list of daily news items.

“The entire thing is only several hundred lines of code, and Claude wrote the vast majority of it,” Gemal told Ars. “AI helped me ship really really fast and just capitalize on the initial viral tweet asking for Wikipedia with scrolling.”

At first I read that as the project taking from noon until 2am to launch, and I was impressed. Then I re-read that and realized it was just 90 minutes. Jiminy. Programming with AI assistance is just gobsmacking.

★ Wednesday, 12 February 2025